Texas Politics » Nolan Hickshttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics
All Texas politics all the time from the San Antonio Express-News and Houston ChronicleFri, 27 Feb 2015 17:58:11 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.3Sources say Governor’s office offered deal to restore Public Integrity Unit funding if Lehmberg resignedhttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/sources-say-governors-office-offered-deal-to-restore-public-integrity-unit-funding-if-lehmberg-resigned/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/sources-say-governors-office-offered-deal-to-restore-public-integrity-unit-funding-if-lehmberg-resigned/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 02:23:46 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14835AUSTIN — After vetoing funding for the anti-corruption unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, aides to Texas Gov. Rick Perry engaged in negotiations that would have seen the funding restored, provided District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned her position, several sources told the San Antonio Express-News.

Travis County Precinct 3 Commissioner Gerald Daugherty said Tuesday that he reached out to the Governor’s Office to work out a deal to restore the funding after Perry axed the $7.5 million appropriation for the District Attorney’s Public Integrity Unit.

Daugherty said that he spoke with key Perry aide Ken Armbrister about working out such a deal, but that in the end the talks were fruitless because Lehmberg wouldn’t step down.

“What I heard was that as long as Rosemary is willing to stay in her position, there probably is not an avenue for that to happen,” Daugherty said. He added that he expected to speak with the special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, investigating the case in the next couple of weeks.

“There was this massive amount of fear that if Rosemary steps down, it’s the governor who gets to appoint someone,” Daughtery said, adding that a Lehmberg aide was even floated as a potential replacement who might be palatable to Democrats, who dominate Travis County politics.

Attempts to contact the Governor’s Office for comment late Tuesday were not immediately returned.

Daughtery is the sole Republican on the Travis County Commissioners Court. “It never got anywhere.”

He described the conversations, which he said included Armbrister, a former state senator, as high level talks that largely avoided the nitty-gritty of how such a deal might come together.

“We all knew that we were all, kinda, throwing things out but not overly specific, but we all knew what the deal was,” Daughtery said. “We won’t have a fighting chance to get the Governor to reconsider if Rosemary is going to stay in her spot.”

He said that Lehmberg’s implacability stymied any effort to cut a deal.

“It was pretty obvious that wasn’t going to happen, so that’s when I said that I’ve put as much time into this crazy thing as I can, so I just moved on,” he added.

The examination of their campaign finance reports comes as the Select Committee on Transparency in State Operations prepares to hold their first meeting since receiving their special counsel’s draft report on Hall’s activities. That report alleges that Hall may have violated state and federal law in his bid to oust Powers from his position at UT.

Campaign finance records show that since March 2012, Rep. Perry, R-Lubbock, has received more than $20,000 in combined contributions and in-kind donations from the Empower Texans PAC, Jeff Sandefer and Accountability First PAC, which has received major donations from Sandefer and Hall.

Additionally, records show that he has received substantial support from Sullivan’s non-profit, Empower Texans, a 501(c)4, which is not required by federal law to disclose its donors. Empower Texans has not recently disclosed how much it spends to support specific candidates on its recent filings with the Texas Ethics Commission. Instead, the group simply lists bulk expenditures and the candidates those bulk expenditures go to support.

Empower Texans PAC and Sandefer also gave nearly $5,000 in contributions and in-kind support to Rep. Flynn, R-Canton, in 2012. However, Flynn got a similar sized amount of money from the other side — receiving $5,000 from Texas House Speaker Joe Straus’ Texas House Leadership Fund in 2012.

Sullivan led efforts to oust Straus, who ordered the select committee to investigate Hall, from his leadership role during the last two legislative sessions. And Hall and Sandefer gave a combined $300,000 to Accountability First PAC, which targeted Straus’ allies during the 2014 Republican primary.

]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/critics-of-uts-powers-donated-to-two-transparency-committee-members/feed/0State health officials dispute Patrick’s claims tying immigration to diseaseshttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/state-health-officials-dispute-patricks-claims-ties-between-immigration-diseases/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/state-health-officials-dispute-patricks-claims-ties-between-immigration-diseases/#commentsTue, 15 Apr 2014 23:39:31 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14772Patrick repeated some of his claims about links between immigration and rare illnesses during his throw-down with San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro over immigration.

As part of a larger story we were working on about Patrick’s immigration claims, we called up the Department of State Health Services to see if there was anything to previous, similar claims that he made in 2006.

Here’s that part of the story, which was cut for space:

In 2006, Patrick claimed that undocumented immigrants were responsible for spreading diseases largely banished from developed countries.

“They are bringing Third World diseases with them,” Patrick said, according to The Texas Observer, listing “tuberculosis, malaria, polio and leprosy.”

State health officials say there’s little basis for those claims.

Take polio for instance. The Department of State Health Services couldn’t provide any information about cases because the disease has been “eradicated in the Western hemisphere,” said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the DSHS.

All of Texas’ malaria cases are imported, he said, and not by immigrants. Instead, those infected typically were traveling to or from a part of the world, such as Africa, where the disease is rampant.

While there is a link between immigration and leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease?, Van Deusen said, there is an equally strong link between contracting it and contact with armadillos or coming from an old European family that has a genetic quirk making them susceptible to the disease.

Most humans, he pointed out, are genetically immune from getting Hansen’s, which is not easily spread.

Additionally, antibiotics can kill the bacteria that cause it.

Finally, the number of tuberculosis cases in Texas is less than a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, Van Deusen said. That trend has continued in recent years as the number of cases continues to drop, slowly, but steadily, he added.

“TB is probably where immigration plays the biggest factor, just because of the nature of the disease,” which can lie dormant for years, he said.

]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/state-health-officials-dispute-patricks-claims-ties-between-immigration-diseases/feed/0Texas House releases Rusty Hardin’s draft Wallace Hall reporthttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/texas-house-releases-draft-wallace-hall-report/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/texas-house-releases-draft-wallace-hall-report/#commentsWed, 09 Apr 2014 00:29:13 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14709After days of speculation and leaks, The Texas House of Representatives has made the draft report its committee received examining the behavior of UT System Regent Wallace Hall on its website. Its release comes five days after it was made available to members of the Select House Committee on Transparency in State Government Operations.

The report, which was prepared by the committee’s special counsel, Houston attorney Rusty Hardin, runs 174 pages and details a wide variety of allegations against Hall, including possible violations of state and federal law, which it says meets the standard for impeachable behavior.

Investigative Report Committee on Transparency in State Agency Operations (Text)
]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/texas-house-releases-draft-wallace-hall-report/feed/0The disputed math behind Medicaid expansion fighthttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/the-disputed-math-behind-medicaid-expansion-fight/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/the-disputed-math-behind-medicaid-expansion-fight/#commentsThu, 03 Apr 2014 13:00:04 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14695Republicans across Texas haven’t been shy about their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, or the expansion of Medicaid it includes.

“Medicaid expansion is a misguided, and ultimately doomed, attempt to mask the shortcomings of Obamacare. It would benefit no one in our state to see their taxes skyrocket and our economy crushed as our budget crumbled under the weight of oppressive Medicaid costs,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said at a press conference in March 2013.

The politics of healthcare have become immensely polarized and personal with the debate and passage of the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion is a key component of that law because it’s the mechanism that would provide health insurance to Americans who can’t afford to purchase it from the healthcare exchange. Originally, states were required to be part of the program, however the Supreme Court later ruled that participation was optional.

But would the cost of the Medicaid expansion really cause taxes to skyrocket, and the state’s economy and budget to crumble?

Currently, Texas has strict limits on who is eligible for the state’s program. For instance, adults who don’t have children are ineligible to join the program in almost all circumstances. The Medicaid expansion proposed under the Affordable Care Act would allow anyone who makes less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line — which equated in 2013 to a whopping $15,856 for a single adult or $32,499 for a family of four — to join the program. The federal government would pay almost the entirety of the cost in the beginning and, under the law, would always pay for at least 90 percent of the expansion.

News reports and state officials have commonly stated that expanding the Medicaid program in this fashion would cost the state about $15 billion over 10 years. Except, that figure, provided by the state Health and Human Services Commission, is actually an estimated total cost for all aspects of the Affordable Care Act, many of which the state is going to have to pay for even though state leaders have remained steadfastly opposed to almost all aspects of the law.

“What?!?,” you say?

In a presentation given to lawmakers in March 2013, state Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Kyle Janek estimated that because of the publicity and outreach involved with the Affordable Care Act, more people who are eligible for Medicaid but not currently part of the program would likely enroll. The estimated price tag? About $6 billion over 10 years, or approximately 40 percent of the total Affordable Care Act implementation cost.

According to that presentation, the estimated cost for expanding Medicaid eligibility to all adults who make less than the 138 percent of the poverty level was about $8.8 billion over 10 years. However, the Legislative Budget Board, the Legislature’s budget arm, came up with a far lower cost estimate of about $4 billion over 10 years. The differences can be attributed to two factors, HHSC spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said. First, HHSC projects that more people will join the Medicaid program than the LBB does; and second, HHSC projected it would cost more to provide the coverage than the LBB does.

Secondly, assume that $1.5 billion figure is correct and that adding it to the state budget would cause taxes to skyrocket and the state’s economy to crumble. However, it begs the question why that hasn’t already happened. Taxpayers in the five major urban counties in Texas — Harris (Houston), Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth), Bexar (San Antonio) and Travis (Austin) — already shell out more than $1.5 billion a year in hospital district taxes to provide care and facilities for their largely indigent populations. A study commissioned by Methodist Healthcare Ministries and Texas Impact estimated total local government spending on providing health care at roughly $2.5 billion a year.

Thirdly, expanding Medicaid would produce additional revenue for hospital districts, potentially allowing county governments to cut their tax rate. In Bexar County, hospital district officials estimate that expanding Medicaid would save them $52 million a year, roughly 20 percent of the amount of revenue they get from the hospital district tax, and County Judge Nelson Wolff said he would cut property taxes to pass on the savings if it were approved. In Harris County, hospital district officials say the expansion of Medicaid would mean they would receive an additional $77.5 million in reimbursements, or roughly 15 percent of their tax revenue, based on 2013 financials.

]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/the-disputed-math-behind-medicaid-expansion-fight/feed/0Key members of Dewhurst campaign resign amid strategy disputehttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/key-members-of-dewhurst-campaign-resign-amid-strategy-dispute/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/04/key-members-of-dewhurst-campaign-resign-amid-strategy-dispute/#commentsWed, 02 Apr 2014 17:38:14 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14697Two key members of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s campaign for reelection have resigned because of a dispute about campaign strategy, one of them told the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle on Wednesday.

The two staffers — Travis Considine, the Dewhurst campaign’s chief spokesman, and Andy Hemming, its research chief — resigned at a meeting on Tuesday, Considine said. Their resignations were effective immediately, he added.

“Everyone agrees there is a path to victory, but there is disagreement about what that path is,” Considine told the newspapers.

The dispute centered around Dewhurst’s decision to bring in Chris Beavers and Joe Manero, two Houston-based campaign consultants, who had been informal advisors to the campaign, Considine said. He said the two had been informal advisors in the past, but would not elaborate.

Dewhurst’s campaign for reelection has been struggling. He was walloped by state Sen. Dan Patrick in the March primary by 13 percentage points. However, the four-way race went to a runoff because Patrick failed to get 50 percent of the vote. The runoff will take place May 27.

Still, even after leaving the campaign, Considine stuck up for his former candidate.

“Lt. Gov. Dewhurst remains the most conservative choice in this race and I’m proud to have worked for a man who helped build the Texas miracle,” he said, “and I learned a lot from his leadership.”

He pounded the need for border security by citing “hardened criminals we arrested from 2008 to 2012 — not illegals who were here for a job, who got four speeding tickets, but hardened criminals — 141,000 we put in our jails just in four years in Texas.”

“They threaten your family. They threaten your life. They threaten your business. They threaten our state,” he said, adding they were charged with 447,000 crimes including 2,000 murders and 5,000 rapes.

When asked where he got the statistics from, Patrick campaign spokesman Logan Spence referred the Express-News to a 2013 report produced by the Department of Public Safety, entitled “Texas Public Safety Threat Overview 2013″.

The statistics, as published by the Texas Department of Public Safety, don’t actually say what Patrick said. Here’s the paragraph the from the report’s key findings section that the senator seems to be quoting:

Another crime-related public safety concern exists from criminal aliens, who may not be affiliated with the cartels and gangs but act alone to commit crime in Texas. From October 2008 to December 2012, Texas identified a total of 141,982 unique criminal alien defendants booked into Texas county jails. These individuals, identified through the Secure Communities initiative, are responsible for at least 447,844 individual criminal charges over their criminal careers, including 2,032 homicides and 5,048 sexual assaults.

Spence defended his boss, the senator, in a written statement:

“The Department of Public Safety reports states: ‘If there were a national organized crime index in the Uniform Crime Report, Texas would most likely lead the nation as a direct result of Mexican cartel and gang activity along the border and throughout the state,” he said. “This is unacceptable and it threatens the public safety, health and property rights of all Texas citizens, not to mention the direct victims of the human and narco-trafficking activities.

He added: “Those who minimize the significance of these facts or accuse Dan Patrick of political gamesmanship need to take a long look in the mirror.”

The problems with Patrick’s statement, as compared to what DPS reported, are numerous. It conflates and confuses the issue and misstates what the report actually claims.

At first blush, it appears that Patrick is saying the stats track undocumented immigrants who were arrested. DPS spokesman Tom Vinger told the Express-News the stats actually track anyone who was arrested in Texas on state charges and is subsequently identified by the U.S. Department Homeland Security as an alien, without “differentiating whether they are legal or illegal aliens at the time of their arrest.” Homeland Security defines an alien as “[a]ny person not a citizen or national of the United States.

For example, if a French (or British or from wherever) college student traveled to Austin during South by Southwest and was arrested and booked for smoking pot, he would be counted in this statistic.

Secondly, Patrick says those 141,000 had been charged with 447,000 crimes, including 2,000 murders and 5,000 sexual assaults, implying they were arrested for those crimes over that four-year period, which isn’t accurate. The DPS report states that the 141,000 people it had arrested had been charged with 447,000 “individual criminal charges over their criminal careers.” Vinger said that DPS does not track how many of those 141,000 were being arrested for the first time. It’s also important to point out that these are simply arrests for someone who was charged with a crime, not a conviction.

Thirdly, Patrick describes those arrested as “hardened criminals,” who “threaten your family”, “threaten your life”, “threaten your business,” and “threaten our state.” The implication of that statement is that the folks who were arrested are serial offenders with records of violence. However, the charging statistics he’s referencing count all felonies, Class A and B misdemeanors (such as driving while intoxicated or possession of marijuana), and a limited number of Class C misdemeanors. When asked to provide a breakdown of the charges, Vinger said The Express-News would need to file an Open Records Request to obtain that information.

It’s not the first time Patrick’s made a statement like that. When he was running for his first term in the Texas Senate, in 2006, he offered a similar critique of undocumented immigrants, The Texas Observer reported at the time:

But Patrick saves his most hard-edged oratory for illegal immigrants. He blames them for a rising crime rate, overcrowded schools, an overburdened health-care system, and runaway growth in the state budget. “The number one problem we are facing,” he tells audiences, “is the silent invasion of the border. We are being overrun. It is imperiling our safety.”

“The crime rate is soaring,” he says, “and most of it can be tracked to illegal immigration. There are terrorists and drug runners coming into Texas and the sheriffs in 15 border counties are being asked to stop them with only a .45 on their hip and a shotgun in the trunk. They’ll tell you it’s the federal government’s responsibility,” he adds, “but the cavalry is not coming. It’s up to us to protect our borders.”

DPS crime statistics reports from 2006 show that total crime was actually down when compared to 2005, and the crime rate in 2005 was lower than it was in 2004. While crime did increase statewide from 2000 through 2003, the number of violent and property crimes was still markedly lower than it was in the early 1990s, when the state’s legal and undocumented populations were much smaller.

The Houston-area Republican, who is the GOP’s leading candidate for lieutenant governor, told a group in 2006 that immigrants are “bringing Third World diseases with them,” referencing “tuberculosis, malaria, polio and leprosy.” (A top official at the Department of State Health Services had to slap that down, pointing out, for instance, there hasn’t been a case of polio in decades).

When asked to address the issue of immigration at a forum of leading business groups during this campaign, Patrick chose to talk about violent crime, as our Peggy Fikac reported:

He pounded the need for border security by citing “hardened criminals we arrested from 2008 to 2012 — not illegals who were here for a job, who got four speeding tickets, but hardened criminals — 141,000 we put in our jails just in four years in Texas.”

“They threaten your family. They threaten your life. They threaten your business. They threaten our state,” he said, adding they were charged with 447,000 crimes including 2,000 murders and 5,000 rapes.

A spokesman for Patrick’s campaign, Logan Spence, attributed those statistics back to Texas Department of Public Safety report that was published in 2013.

This is nothing new for Patrick. In that 2006 address, which was attended by a Texas Observer reporter, he said something remarkably similar.

He blames them for a rising crime rate, overcrowded schools, an overburdened health-care system, and runaway growth in the state budget. “The number one problem we are facing,” he tells audiences, “is the silent invasion of the border. We are being overrun. It is imperiling our safety.”

Patrick’s use of the phrase “illegal invasion” paints a picture of a massive influx of undocumented immigrants streaming across the U.S./Mexico border into Texas (see: stop “the illegal invasion” tweet, which is in the present tense).

Except the data show there’s not a massive influx of people of undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

According to The Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project, the number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in 2012 was less than it was in 2007, though it has been growing slowly since 2009.

Additionally, Pew’s data shows that the number of undocumented immigrants coming from Mexico has continued to decline for the last several years, roughly since the onset of the 2008 recession. That decline has been offset by growth in undocumented immigration from other countries.

Unlike the national trend, however, the size of the undocumented immigrant population in Texas continued to increase through the recession, Pew found. From 1990 through 2012, the state’s population of undocumented immigrants increased from 450,000 to about 1.7 million. However, the rate of growth has dramatically slowed in recent years.

Patrick spokesman Logan Spence defended his boss’s use of the phrase “illegal invasion.”

“Dan Patrick believes that public safety is government’s first responsibility and a major part of that is securing our southern border,” Spence said, in a written statement. “Although Dan is sympathetic to the plight of undocumented immigrants, an unsecured border presents a serious public safety threat that is currently being exploited by transnational gangs and criminals.”

Patrick has also pinned the “illegal invasion” on President Barack Obama. The numbers from Pew show that undocumented immigration increased at a relatively steady rate for almost 20 years — from President George H. W. Bush’s administration through Clinton and then through most of his son’s presidency. The number began to rapidly decline after the onset of the financial crisis on Wall Street, which roughly coincided with the election of Obama.

“The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico,” Pew wrote in a 2012 article, explaining why immigration from Mexico to the U.S. had come to a screeching halt.

The Pew Research Center does not break down the flow of undocumented immigrants by state, so we called the local Sheriff’s offices in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, two of the biggest counties in the Rio Grande Valley, to see what’s going on.

“Here in Cameron County, it is very quiet,” said Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio. “Since 2005, I don’t have any report of a homicide that was committed by the cartel. I don’t have any reports of any kidnapping or home invasion (related to the cartels).”

“Do we have homicides here? Yes we do, but they are domestic homicides,” he added, unrelated to drug violence.

And as for the talk about an “illegal invasion”? It’s “a bunch of (expletive)” he said, pointing out that his family first immigrated to Texas when it was still part of Spain.

“(Are) there a lot of drugs being crossed around through the river? Yes. Do we apprehend quite a bit of it? Yes. Do we arrest quite a (few) people? Yes,” he said. “Are they from Mexico? No, they’re local people … many of them are United States citizens, born and raised here.”

]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/data-belies-dan-patricks-illegal-invasion-claim/feed/0Equal pay attacks evidence Wendy Davis’ campaign has righted itself, says observerhttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/equal-pay-attacks-evidence-wendy-davis-campaign-has-righted-itself-says-observer/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/equal-pay-attacks-evidence-wendy-davis-campaign-has-righted-itself-says-observer/#commentsFri, 21 Mar 2014 21:35:45 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14624For the first couple of months this year, it seemed like the Wendy Davis campaign for governor was being run by The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

However, Davis’ ability to put Attorney General Greg Abbott, her Republican opponent for Governor, on the defensive over the equal pay legislation, seems to have pushed the narrative of the ‘bumbling, incompetent campaign’ into the background, at least for now.

“The politics of this are such that it’s hard not to look at this as a win for the Davis campaign, not because it’s going to determine anything in the long run, but because it halts the narrative that the campaign isn’t accomplishing anything with the media,” said Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s a little insidery” (which makes it perfect for the Texas Politics blog) “but it’s an important frame here. If you want talk about what the politics of this are, that’s a big, immediate gain for the Davis camp.”

“Everyday, that there’s a story that the Davis campaign is driving that’s about defining Greg Abbott, is another day that goes by without yet another story… in the plot line that had been really gaining momentum: that the Davis campaign was really disappointing,” he added. “So now, the growing trope, unless they run into trouble again, is that the campaign has righted itself, because they are making substantive, and reasonably well-covered” (in terms of news coverage) “attacks on Abbott’s policy positions, in areas that probably matter to targeted areas of voters.”

He made the remarks as part of an interview I did with him for a story that ran in the morning’s paper, which found that minorities are underrepresented in key positions in the Attorney General’s office, and that minorities on average make less than their Anglo coworkers.

]]>http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/equal-pay-attacks-evidence-wendy-davis-campaign-has-righted-itself-says-observer/feed/0Anti-abortion group backed by GOP donorshttp://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/anti-abortion-group-backed-by-gop-donors/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2014/03/anti-abortion-group-backed-by-gop-donors/#commentsWed, 19 Mar 2014 16:57:20 +0000http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/?p=14579One of the biggest Republican donors in Texas is also a significant contributor to the anti-abortion group that aired thousands of dollars in negative advertising against Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis just days before the March primary.

In all, the ten biggest donors to Texans Right to Life PAC, which is based in Houston, have donated millions to Republicans and conservative causes over the last decade, data from Texas Ethics Commission that was last updated in February shows. For instance:

- Prominent GOP donor Jim Leininger and his wife, Cecelia, have given the PAC a combined $117,000 since 2002. That’s almost 20 percent of the roughly $695,000 of fundraising the PAC has reported from April 2001 through January. That’s just a small fraction of their overall giving. Since 2000, the Leiningers have given a combined nearly $7.8 million to politicians and political committees in Texas since 2000, which has gone almost exclusively to Republican causes and business interests.

- Kathaleen Wall, a Houston resident who describes herself as a homemaker, donated $26,500 to Texas Right to Life. Wall bankrolled Diane Williams’ 2012 bid to unseat state Rep. Hubert Vo, a Houston Democrat, donating more than $200,000 to the campaign.

- Farris Wilks and his wife, JoAnn, have given a combined total of $41,000 to the Texas Right to Life PAC. They donated $160,000 to the Texas Right to Life Education Fund and $1.1 million to Focus on the Family, through their charity in 2012, publicly available IRS tax documents show. And the couple gave $25,000 to Gov. Rick Perry’s state campaign, Texans for Rick Perry, in 2012.

Texans Right to Life PAC managed to raise almost $80,000, including contributions from Wall and the Leiningers, in the run-up to the ad blitz in December and January, more than 10 percent of its total fundraising since 2001. The group spent more than $11,000 to air the ads in both English and Spanish on radio station in the Rio Grande Valley and in Corpus Christi.

The ads that aired just before the Democratic primary marked the second time the group had taken to the airwaves to assail Wendy Davis’ opposition to new restrictions on abortion.

“After the election, I heard more about (the ads) than I did before,” said Jerry Polinard, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-Pan American. “Abortion never really has ranked that high, though, on the list of what are the most important political problems facing the Latino community.”